Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Birth and Lineage of St. Gregory—Path from the World to the Cloister—Prayer, Study, and Charity—His Cat—A Prophecy—A Cardinal Deacon—Mission to Constantinople—Eutyches’ Heresy—Rome in Pestilence—Gregory Elected Pope—His Unbelievable Accomplishments—His Life as Pope—Championship of the Oppressed—Bond with English-speaking People—The Great Procession During the Pestilence—Gregory’s Successors.

Three years before St. Benedict and his sister Scholastica passed away, there was born, in a palace on the Coelian Hill, a child who was christened Gregory, a name which signified “Vigilant.” His lineage was exceedingly illustrious, his parents belonging to the great old Gens Anicia, a family of nobles which had been respected and honoured ever since the days of the Republic, and in which, to use the words of a chronicler of Gregory’s time, “the men seemed all to have been born Consuls, and the women Saints.”

Gregory’s mother was St. Silvia, and I have seen the garden on the quiet Coelian Hill where as a child he ran about at her side, asking a thousand questions, as clever children will, while she tended her flowers and gathered healing herbs—the “basilica” and “Madrecara” and “erba della Madonna” still dear to Roman apothecaries—to make into medicines for the sick poor who thronged her charitable doors. Mothers see a long way, and, while Gregory’s father was planning a great career in the world for his only son, Silvia was praying that God would keep him pure, and make him great in His sight. And her prayers prevailed, as mothers’ prayers generally do, and, though she had to wait a little, she lived to see their fulfilment.

As the boy grew up he threw himself heart and soul into his father’s plans; he studied hard, and his naturally brilliant gifts brought him much distinction. He rejoiced in all the pleasant things that birth and wealth had bestowed on him—good looks, popularity, rich garments, and sparkling jewels—and no doubt was immensely pleased and flattered when, being still quite young, he was made Proctor of Rome. That charge, however, was a grave one at the time, as the Lombards, the most cruel and brutal of all the savage tribes that had threatened the Eternal City, chose the period of Gregory’s proctorship to descend upon her and make her feel the weight of their heavy hand. There were religious troubles, too, and Gregory, who through all his busy official life in the world was an ardent Christian, was deeply exercised and distressed by them. But the world was only to claim him for a little while, in his early manhood. Then he was withdrawn from it to be prepared, through many long years of prayer and penance and study, to step forth towards the end of his life as its rescuer and ruler. Little by little the inner call came, faint at first, sometimes resisted, but ever stronger, till Gregory understood and obeyed.

His heart had gone out at once to the Benedictine monks, when, on the destruction of Monte Cassino by the Lombards, they had sought refuge in Rome. Some of them became his most intimate friends and their encouragement smoothed his path from the world to the cloister. From the moment when he recognised and embraced his vocation, all hesitation left him. He sold all his goods, distributed the larger part to the poor, and, as if to atone for what the Lombards had destroyed, built and endowed six new monasteries, placing twelve Benedictines in each, in Sicily. That done, he converted his home on the Coelian into a seventh, where he gathered another community about him, of the same learned Order. His father was dead, and his mother, on becoming a widow, had already built a convent close by, where she had taken the veil herself.

Gregory now devoted himself to three things—prayer, study, and charity. For his own use—he was quickly elected abbot of the monastery—he reserved a small cell, where he could enjoy the solitude he now so greatly desired, but—a delightfully human touch!—he could not get on without his favourite cat, and one can see him, in imagination, pausing from his writing to smooth her velvety head when she sprang upon the table and rubbed it against his cheek! I had a little cat once who would sit motionless on a chair beside me all night while I was writing, but the instant I laid down the pen she was on my lap or my shoulder, talking in her own way, most intelligently and cheeringly; so I was mightily pleased when I read about St. Gregory’s cat!

The Benedictine Rule provided for all hospitality to strangers and the poor, but at the same time directed that the monks themselves were not to be disturbed from prayer and study. St. Gregory, however, seems to have received all who wished to see him, perhaps as an exercise of patience. Now there was a poor ship-wrecked sailor who seemed inclined to abuse the privilege. He came again and again, and was never turned away, but on the occasion of what proved to be his last visit Gregory had not a single thing left to give him. He was looking round his rough cell in perplexity, when a messenger appeared bringing the silver basin full of porridge, which was the only food he allowed himself and which his mother sent him every day! Here was what was needed! The next moment the needy sailor man was walking away with the hot porridge and the silver porringer. What St. Silvia said when she heard of the incident has not been recorded—but Gregory never gave the matter another thought until one day, long after, when the importunate sailor appeared to him in his true character, that of an Angel of light, and told him that God had taken note of his charity and—an alarming prophecy for the Saint—that he would be elected Pope and do great things for the Church.

All he asked was to be left quiet in his monastery, where he was putting his whole heart into living the life of a model monk. In his ardour against himself, he carried his penances too far and fasted so rigorously that he came near to dying—an imprudence for which he paid ever after in broken health and in being debarred from fasting at all. He complains pitifully of having to “drag about such a big body with so little strength,” but this was the least of the trials that awaited him.

In the year 577, when Gregory was about thirty-seven years of age, the reigning Pope, Benedict I, sent for him and insisted upon making him one of the Cardinal Deacons to whom was entrusted the jurisdiction of the seven “Regions” into which the city was divided. Gregory protested, but had to take on the charge, and from that time forward he belonged less to himself than to others. He was too necessary and valuable to be spared. The next year, Pope Benedict being dead, his successor, Pelagius II, decided to send Gregory on a very difficult and important mission to the Emperor Tiberius Constantinus at Constantinople, where trouble of all kinds seemed to be brewing. Although Gregory bewails this “thrusting out from port into the storm,” one cannot but feel how the alert fighting spirit in the man leaps to the call. The born leader may persuade himself that he is happiest in the seclusion he thinks good for his soul, but when the call to arms comes every repressed fibre of his being wakes and cries for action.

When Gregory, taking with him several of his monks, sailed away from Italy, he little dreamed that years were to pass before he should return. On his arrival in Constantinople, the first matter to claim his attention was the ugly new heresy started by Eutyches, who had drawn the Emperor and many others into the path of error by declaring that there was to be no resurrection of the flesh. Gregory was politely received by the Emperor, and instantly requested the latter to call a conference in which the dogma should be discussed. Tiberius consented, and there followed the famous conference in which Gregory’s fiery eloquence and invincible logic quashed the heresy at once. When he had finished speaking, the Emperor commanded that a fire should be lighted, and with his own hands and in the presence of a vast concourse burnt the book which Eutyches had written to propound the heresy, and declared himself now and for ever the faithful son of the Church. Eutyches, touched to the heart by Gregory’s arguments, accepted defeat and rebuke as but small punishment for his fault, and when he was dying, soon afterwards, pulled up the skin of one poor emaciated hand with the fingers of the other and cried to those around him, “I confess that in this flesh we shall rise from the dead!” Gregory proved a successful ambassador in every way. The relations between the Church and the imperial court had been badly interrupted by the Lombard invasion, but he welded them smoothly and firmly together. Tiberius died while Gregory was in Constantinople, and his successor, Maurice, was badly disposed to the Church. Gregory brought him to a better mind and obliged him to rescind an edict he had just issued forbidding any member of the army to embrace the monastic life.

At last, after six years of what must have been the most anxious work, requiring all that the great man had of wisdom and firmness and tact, he returned to Italy—to find his beloved Rome in terrible distress from a visitation of the pestilence. Gregory at once devoted himself to the care of the sick and dying, and one can fancy how the poor people’s eyes lighted up when he appeared among them again. Then the good Pope Pelagius succumbed to the disease, and at once all eyes turned to Gregory, who was unanimously elected as his successor.

Gregory was honestly horrified. He refused, he pleaded, he argued, but no one would listen to him. Then he fled. Disguised as a peasant, he slipped away and hid himself in a secret cave in the hills, entreating the Lord to protect him from the awful honour which his fellow-citizens wished to thrust upon him. They meanwhile were searching for him in every direction, and would have failed in their quest had not Heaven put itself visibly on their side. From very far off they beheld a tall pillar of light resting before the fugitive’s cave—they rushed to it, dragged him forth, and made him Pope. Seeing that his fellow-citizens would not listen to him, he wrote to the Emperor Maurice, begging him not to confirm the election, but the Romans intercepted the letter; the Emperor was informed of the election in the usual way and was only too glad to give it the imperial sanction, still required then from Constantinople. For once the “Vox Populi” had proved itself what it never is, nowadays, the “Vox Dei,” and for fourteen years Gregory reigned, in virtue and wisdom and glory, for the everlasting good of the people of God. Every gift that Heaven had bestowed upon him vindicated its unerring designs. He accomplished in those fourteen years so many wonderful things that cold sense almost refuses its adherence to the visible facts. His colossal labours for the Church gave us the Gregorian chant, the Sacramentary of the missal, and the Breviary; his correspondence, so vast that, like Napoleon and Julius CÆsar, he is supposed to have dictated to several secretaries at once, embraces every point that required treating of at home and abroad. His sermons, day after day, instructed the ignorant in the plain truths of salvation, while they no less amazed and illuminated the minds of the most learned; and through it all his soul was never disturbed from the calm heights of union with God, his heart never closed to a single cry from the suffering and the weary. The much abbreviated list of “some of his labours,” as the Breviary puts it, would stagger the grasp of any modern scholar or ruler. In a few lines he is shown to us reËstablishing the Catholic Faith in many places where it had suffered, repressing the Donatists in Africa, the Arians in Spain, expelling the Agnostics from Alexandria, and refusing the “Pallium” (the sign of pontifical investiture) to Syagrius, the Bishop-elect of Autun, until he had turned the “heretic Neophytes”[3] out of Gaul; quelling the audacity of John, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had dared to call himself the “Head of the Universal Church,” and so on, preaching, writing, praying, and through it all suffering constantly and acutely.

There is a legend to the effect that all these pains and sicknesses had been voluntarily accepted in order to deliver a certain soul from Purgatory. The legend is only a legend, unsupported by the authority of the Church—but it would have been just like St. Gregory to do it!

In every public or private trouble or upheaval, as well as in every effort to reorganise and restore, his name, his presence is dominant. After becoming Pope, he lived chiefly at the Lateran palace, then the official Papal residence, and they still keep there the narrow pallet that served him for a bed, and—mark this, ye modern schoolboys!—the little rod which he had to use to keep his dark-eyed, rampageous young choristers in order!

The men who can govern others with the most unerring wisdom are often entirely mistaken in their appreciation of themselves. Only the other day the local and most successful Superior of a great missionary order in America was bewailing his fate to me. “I told the Bishop he was making a dreadful mistake in making me the Rector,” he declared. “It is not my work—I was not intended to govern and lead! I am a born free-lance—I want to travel all over the country seeking out the lost souls. I am no good at anything else!”

But the Bishop knew better; and so it was with the great crowd of clergy and laity who designated Gregory for the Papacy. What he accomplished during his pontificate has been well summed up by Montalembert: “Gregory, who alone amongst men has received, by universal consent, the double surname of Saint and Great, will be an everlasting honour to the Benedictine order, as to the Papacy. By his genius, but especially by the charm and ascendency of his virtue, he was destined to organise the temporal power of the Popes, to develop and regulate their spiritual sovereignty, to found their paternal supremacy over the new-born crowns and races which were to become the great nations of the future, and to be called France, Spain, and England. It was he, indeed, who inaugurated the middle ages, modern society, and Christian civilisation.” The task he undertook was a gigantic one, for on the one side he had to contend with the exactions and oppressions of the corrupt and decrepit Byzantine Emperors who were still the nominal rulers of Rome and his own secular masters; on the other, with the great new forces let loose on the world in the increasing vigour and supremacy of the Lombards and other northern nations, more than half barbarous still, but, as Gregory clearly perceived, possessed of an intelligence and vitality which only required training and instruction to grow into great, new polities which would replace the already dead Roman Empire.

To appreciate his labours one would have to read that colossal correspondence which has fortunately been preserved entire. Besides the mighty matters of Church and Empire which it sets forth, there shows all through the most tender and minute care for the lower and therefore unprotected classes, as well as for individual souls. Slavery, in every form, excited Gregory’s generous indignation, and his most earnest efforts were devoted to restoring slaves to the rank of human beings. The peasants on the great, estates were serfs—practically slaves. He decreed that their marriages should be inviolable, their property their own, their wills valid; that wherever possible the Church revenues should be devoted to buying the freedom of slaves and that never, on any plea, should Christians be sold to Jews or pagans. At the same time he enacted that neither Jews nor pagans should be baptised by force, and commanded that the synagogues of the Jews should be restored to them and that they should be allowed freedom of worship. Always humble and diffident about asking anything for himself, it is amusing to find him severely reprimanding a Bishop who had authorised or permitted extortionate exactions to be practised against an obscure farmer in Sardinia, and at the same time writing meekly to the overseer of some ecclesiastical property in Sicily—a stud farm where were kept four hundred stallions: “You have sent me one bad horse and four asses. I cannot ride the horse, because it is bad, nor the asses, because they are asses. If you would assist to sustain me, send me something that I can use!”

But, after all, the special bond between St. Gregory and English-speaking peoples lies in the memorable act by which England was evangelised, after the Faith first planted there had been annihilated by the pagan Barbarians, Saxons, Angles, Scandinavians, to whom she fell an easy prey when Rome withdrew its protecting legions and abandoned her to her fate.

It is rather sweet to know that it was the fair, innocent beauty of a group of English children, standing, dazed and frightened, in the market to be sold, that first touched his heart to such warm pity for their country. He was then living as the abbot of the community he had founded on the Coelian Hill, and enough has been said to show how happy he was in his quiet life there.

It must have been some unusual necessity which took him far down into the town on a certain day and through the noisy, crowded slave market. But on seeing the children, with their blue eyes full of tears and their long golden hair shining in the sun, everything else was forgotten; he stopped abruptly to ask who they were.

“Angles, from the isle of Britain,” was the answer, given indifferently enough. The keeper knew that the big, dark-faced monk was not a slave-buyer.

“Angles! They are born to be angels!” cried Gregory, and straightway he flew to the Pope and besought permission to go with some of his monks to Britain to preach the Gospel. The Pope, taken by surprise, consented, and before he had time to think over the matter Gregory, with his volunteers, had put three days of travelling between himself and Rome. Then the news leaked out, and the people rose like one man and rushed to the Pope, who was on his way to St. Peter’s, and, arresting his progress, burst into indignant cries: “You have offended St. Peter! You have ruined Rome in allowing Gregory to leave us!”

Pelagius saw his mistake and sent messengers in all haste to call Gregory back. Of course he obeyed; he never forgot England, but it was only in the sixth year of his own pontificate (596) that he could carry out his design, and then he could not himself take part in the expedition. He found a noble substitute in St. Augustine, and it must have been with a glad heart that he sent him forth, and gave him and his forty Benedictines the final blessing, as they knelt (so we are told) on the grassy stretch below the steps of Gregory’s own convent on the Coelian Hill. The grass grows there still; still the green trees shadow the enclosure called St. Gregory’s park, through which one approaches the Church, and still the flowers bloom in Silvia’s garden where he played as a little boy. Even modern Rome has been loath to encroach on the place so dear to him who loved Rome so much.

I have often wondered what became of the little English children he saw and, seeing, loved. Surely he rescued them and placed them with kind people to be cared for. His quick notice of them reminds one of our own Pius IX, who could never pass an English child without stopping to bless it, and, while blessing the child, to pray for England, whom Augustine and his companions made “the Isle of Saints” and the “Dowry of Mary.” Poor England! she threw her glory to the winds at the command of an adulterous King and his unspeakable daughter, and, now that even the moth-eaten rags of her heresies will no longer hold together, dares to call her crumbling simulacrum of a Church the “Church of Saint Augustine”! That never died, in reality; and all honour to those of her children who, through three hundred years of abominable persecution and oppression, kept the Faith, and prepared the way for its splendid renaissance to-day!

One more picture of St. Gregory must close this humble sketch of his great life. As already related, after he had been elected Pope he sent a letter to the Emperor Maurice, imploring him not to confirm the decision of the people. And just then, as if jealous of all the good work that was going forward, the Powers of Evil let loose a terrible outbreak of the pestilence in Rome. They could not touch the spiritual city—Rome invisible, the Sanctuary of the Faith, but the material one seemed to be delivered into their hands and terrible were its sufferings. Poverty and neglect, and the ruin of ceaseless wars, had made it vulnerable at every point; the pestilence had swept it again and again, but this was the most frightful visitation of all. Gregory and his monks, and many other charitable persons, devoted themselves to the sick and dying; the lazarets and hospitals were crowded—every day with new sufferers as the dead were carried out; but it became impossible to bury the dead fast enough. Neither prayer nor effort seemed of any avail, and dull despair settled on all hearts. Apparently this was to be the end.

Then Gregory instituted the first of those great processions which, in moments of stress, have moved across the pages of history ever since, awing us a little by the whole-hearted faith and trust of our ancestors in the mercy of Heaven. Gregory decreed that all, Clergy and Laity, who could stand on their feet should put on the garments of penitence and follow him through the stricken streets to pray at the Tomb of St. Peter. And all who could obeyed like one man. What a sight that must have been when the Saint, “the strong, dark-faced man of heavy build,” led his afflicted people from the “Mother of Churches” at the Lateran Gate down past all the ruined pomp of the Palatine and the Colosseum and the Forum towards the river and the great Basilica of Constantine beyond! How the response of the Major Litanies must have thundered up from all those breaking hearts to the “skies of brass” that hung over Rome! The ever-repeated “Te rogamus, audi nos!” and “Libera nos, Domine” even now bring tears to one’s eyes with their almost despairing simplicity; then they were the last appeals of a crushed and ruined race for one more chance to repent and atone for its heaped misdeeds. And the chance was granted. As the endless procession moved along towards St. Peter’s its leader paused before the Mausoleum of Hadrian, that huge monument of pagan ambition, and raised his eyes and heart in supplication, offering we know not what of his own life and destiny for his people’s sins.

Suddenly he stood transfigured. The chanting ceased; all eyes followed Gregory’s gaze, all ears were strained to catch the heavenly melody that floated, high and clear, fresh as the song of birds at dawn, over the sorrowing city:

It was the chant of the Resurrection!

“Alleluia, Alleluia!” came the sequel in one burst from that great multitude, as the angels’ voices grew fainter and were lost in the depths overhead. And then, on hearts bursting now with relief and joy, there fell the awe that mortals feel in the presence of the Heavenly Ones, for there, on the summit of the towering fortress, stood the radiant Archangel—and he was sheathing his flaming sword.

The pestilence was over. Once more God had had mercy on His people. And, since the angels’ song was addressed to the Queen of Heaven, we know that it was she whose prayers had stayed the arm that had clung round her neck in Bethlehem.

St. Gregory passed to his reward on the 12th of March, 604, having reigned nearly fourteen years. The mourning city chose Sabinianus of Volterra to succeed him, but only three years had elapsed when Sabinianus in his turn made place for a Boniface (III), who lived but one year after his election, and then came another Boniface, a Saint, a strong man of the Abruzzi, and in his reign the world found out that, though imperial Rome was indeed dead, the Rome that Gregory and Benedict and their fellow-workers had planted on her grave during that century of apparent eclipse had taken root below and shot out branches above and had become as a mighty tree affording guidance, shelter, and sustenance to the whole Christian world.

Each of the great Popes seems to have had a special mission to fulfil, one that coloured all his acts and sheds its individual lustre on his memory. No doubt or hesitation seems to accompany the acceptance and fulfilment of it. Boniface’s mission bade him place the seal of visible Christianity on the city and consecrate it to the Faith for all time. It was Boniface, the fourth of that name, who decreed and carried out the Triumph of which I spoke in a preceding chapter. But it is a big subject and it must have a chapter to itself.